As we reported earlier, AMD scored a major coup with the new Mac Pro. The lovely bucket from Cupertino features AMD graphics, which came as a surprise in many circles, as Nvidia is the dominant player in the professional graphics market.

The high-profile design win is expected to generate quite a bit of cash for AMD’s professional graphics business and it will also help boost its unimpressive market share. AMD currently holds about a fifth of the market, so for every FirePro card sold Nvidia manages to ship about four Quadros.

According to Digitimes, this will change next year. AMD could bump its share up to 30 percent by the end of 2014, thanks to Apple. Since we are talking about high-margin products, they should also boost AMD’s overall profitability in 2014.

AMD’s new FirePro S10000 and Sky series server products are competitive, too. They use PCI Express Gen 3, while Nvidia’s Tesla K20C is on PCI Express Gen 2. AMD uses OpenCL, while Nvidia uses its own proprietary CUDA platform.

In addition, AMD has a habit of pricing its professional products more aggressively than Nvidia. Earlier this year we were told by some AMD reps that the company hopes to gain ground in the professional space, but then again AMD has been saying that for years. This time around AMD seems to have a good chance of eroding Nvidia’s lead. However, Nvidia won't take this lying down.

Four of the UK’s largest mobile phone operators have agreed to stop enforcing mid-contract price hikes and to cap bills from stolen or lost phones. For ages now, mobile phone operators have been treating customers like hole in the wall machines and attempted to screw cash out of them. But it seems that they have run up against a British government which is about as popular as Jack the Ripper and desperate to convince voters that it really has their interests at heart.

Government representatives have apparently had a word to the biggest phone companies and asked them very nicely to be a bit kinder to customers. Asking nicely is a prelude to legislation if the companies do not toe the line. The British government looks like it will have to pull out all stops as the cost of living shapes up as the top issue before an election in 2015. The government said on Monday it would cut some green levies paid by energy companies so they could cut prices by a huge £12.

EE, Vodafone, Three and Virgin Media said they would allow customers to break contracts without penalty if their tariffs were raised mid-contract. O2, with about 23 million subscribers, said it was still in talks with Britain's government about the proposals. It was not clear when the proposals on mobile phone charges - among some of the lowest in Europe - would be introduced, but the government said it was aiming for the liability cap to be in place from spring next year.

Fixed-line providers BT, Sky and TalkTalk had also pledged to support European Commission-led plans to eliminate roaming charges within Europe by 2016.